Through economic growth, mergers and acquisitions, business enterprises are becoming ever larger. Further, large business enterprises in the field of high technology now offer ever larger numbers of products and services that derive from an increasingly large variety of technologies, work processes, or sub-components thereof.
In this environment, managing the creation, use, and maintenance of the company's intellectual assets, such as products and technologies is an acute problem. As an enterprise grows, providing documentation of the enterprise products, services and activities that maintain consistent usage of names of products and services throughout the enterprise becomes even more challenging and has many different permutations. When an enterprise derives its business opportunities from research and development into new technologies or improvements of existing technologies, maintaining consistent usage of technology designations is a challenge, especially when there is disagreement or confusion about the uses, advantages or benefits of a particular technology. Such confusion can arise whether disagreements arise or not, as when there is little or no communication between different teams within an enterprise, or when the overhead involved in communicating the complexity outstrips the organization's ability.
The World Wide Web is one communication medium that exacerbates the problem, by allowing access to internal information to the enterprise's partners and customers. Large enterprises that own or operate complex Web sites, portals, or other network resources that contain product and technology information face a related problem. Specifically, ensuring consistent usage of product names, technology terms, and information objects across a large, complicated Web site is problematic. A particular problem involves maintaining consistent use of content when different parts or elements of the Web site applications or other types of documents are created by different individuals or groups, or for varying types of customers or tasks that each user is trying to accomplish.
In addition, an enterprise may want to project a planned impression to its employees, partners, customers and marketplace. Whether formal or causal, traditional or high tech, this impression is projected by the choice of words, fonts, images, audio and video. The same information presented by two different arms of the enterprise may end up projecting two different impressions. A document may be presented in different media, making more difficult the projection of a designed impression. For example, printed documents may have limitations on delivery, such as not containing audio and video clips as can a web page; documents presented on wireless devices typically do not display color and have too few pixels to display most images that can be presented on a printed page. Each of these media continues to be in flux, and systems may have to support presentation of such media using different physical devices or delivery client software.
Furthermore, the content presented to a user depends upon who the user is, or at least what role the user plays. A technical person has a different interest than a marketing person. A corporate partner expects to see more privileged content than a member of the public.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for improved ways to manage one or more vocabularies of all company business practices and pertaining to all business terminology (“concept”), including but not limited to product names and technology terms.
In particular, there is a need for a way to structure stored information about those concepts so that it can be located and retrieved based on its use in various documents, by different users, regardless of who authored the information, who is generating a document that incorporates the information, and where the information resides.
Furthermore, there is a need for presenting the information retrieved in a consistent manner so the enterprise can project a designed impression to its employees, partners, customers and marketplace.
Furthermore there is a need for tailoring the presentations based on the device presenting the document.
There is also need for a system that is extensible or adaptable when new business practices, products or technologies are developed by diverse, distributed groups in a large business enterprise, and that can be shared with other enterprises, individuals, and industry standards across the business world.